[cpitman]

My experience is that you can often find low hanging fruit, relatively easy changes that will have high impact. For example, I've created checklists for some of the processes that we do often, especially when it involves coordinating with a customer. Creating the initial version maybe required a few hours, but since then has been used 100's of times to shave 1-2 weeks off of work and reduce errors/surprises.

Another example is really basic automation. You probably have people/teams around you that are not developers. They probably are spending time doing really basic repetitive tasks. One team I work with regularly would take a spreadsheet, then for each row create a folder and docs in Google Drive. I wrote them a Google Apps script that could do the task with a click. Not quite as impactful as the checklists, but each script like that saves someone a couple days a year.

[ravedave5]

I read about a really cool way to move to having stuff automated - on here I think. You make a bash script as an interactive checklist (e.g. step 1 flip the floop then press Y to continue) and then you can automate steps one by one as time permits. You can also have a log of the steps being done then as well.

[atulatul]

The primary benefit of automating small/ (mundane?) things is that it gets rid of a some of the cognitive load.

For example, I wrote some shell scripts, gradle/TC plugins, when my company moved to kubernetes/openshift. We did not have devops, paas standardization then. The scripts are now getting used in many projects in a couple of departments. And it was just word of mouth adaption. It is as not very fancy stuff nor is it a company wide standard. But it is useful and it hides/gets rid of complexity which new projects/developers no longer have to worry about. Danger area: trying to be too generic, parameterize everything, you end up with frameworks and processes. As a senior dev, I generally aim at solving my problem and if possible making the solution usable in the immediate vicinity. Keeping it minimal and simple makes it usable for others when the problem is not exact match.

[jameshush]

I've done this!!! It works _great_! I have a setup script that new employees run and I never quite figured out how to automate one of the steps, so it just prints "Go to www.example.com/whatever and paste in the API key it generates below." It's been 1.5 years and it's still chuggin' along just fine.

[mooreds]

I did the same thing for a consulting company. The onboarding process involved creating and populating a google drive folder, a slack channel, and a trello board. I used Zapier to create everything off of one entry in a google spreadsheet.

Tons of fun for me, saves some time for someone else, created consistency for everyone.

[c0nsumer]

Your last example is also the sort of thing that makes people really happy.

(And, unfortunately, a small number of folks will practically hate you for it, since you're taking away their "easy" work.)